Figuring out

January 30th, 2013

A recent simplequiz over on HTML5 Doctor threw up some interesting semantic issues. Although the figure element wasn’t the main focus of the article, a lot of the comments were concerned with how it could and should be used.

The element can thus be used to annotate illustrations, diagrams, photos, code listings, etc, that are referred to from the main content of the document, but that could, without affecting the flow of the document, be moved away from that primary content, e.g. to the side of the page, to dedicated pages, or to an appendix.

Steve and Bruce have been campaigning on the HTML mailing list to get the wording updated and clarified.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated semantic question, there was another HTML5 Doctor article a while back about quoting and citing with blockquote and its ilk.